ics, hundreds of spirits are introduced, to which some
definite function or functions were assigned. In many, indeed in the
majority of cases, the precise character of these functions still
escapes us. The material at our disposal is as yet inadequate for any
satisfactory treatment of this phase of Babylonian belief, and we must
content ourselves for the present with some generalizations, or at the
most with some broad classifications. Besides the texts themselves, we
have proper names containing a spirit as an element, and also lists of
those spirits prepared by the schoolmen on the basis of the texts. When,
as sometimes happens, these lists contain explanatory comments on the
spirits enumerated, we are able to take some steps forward in our
knowledge of the subject.

In the first place, then, it is important to bear in mind that the
numerous spirits, when introduced into the religious and other texts,
are almost invariably preceded by a sign--technically known as a
determinative--which stamps them as divine. This sign being the same as
the one placed before the names of the gods, it is not always possible
to distinguish between deities and spirits. The use of a common sign is
significant as pointing to the common origin of the two classes of
superior powers that thus continue to exist side by side. A god is
naught but a spirit writ large. As already intimated in a previous
chapter, a large part of the development of the Babylonian religion
consists in the differentiation between the gods and the spirits,--a
process that, beginning before the period of written records, steadily
went on, and in a certain sense was never completed. In the historical
texts, the gods alone, with certain exceptions, find official
recognition, and it is largely through these texts that we are enabled
to distinguish between the two classes of powers, the gods and the
spirits; but as a survival of a primitive animism, the demons, good,
bad, and indifferent, retain their place in the popular forms of
religion. Several hundred spirits occur in the incantation texts, and
almost as many more in other religious texts. We may distinguish several
classes. In the first place, there are the demons that cause disease and
all manner of physical annoyances. The chief of these will be considered
when we come to the analysis of the incantation texts. Against these
demons the sufferer seeks protection by means of formulas, the utterance
of which is invested